July 29, 2019 • 50 mins
A Kickstarter campaign with a $50,000 goal to fund a beverage cooler with lots of bonus features topped 13 million, so why does the Coolest Cooler end up on so many crowdfunding failure lists?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to beat the
heat with an innovative approach to the old beach standby
the drinks cooler. He added some bells and whistles, updating
the frosty concept with some picky bonus features. To get
things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that was incredibly
successful and earned a lot of ice, but soon found
(00:34):
out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy and the
whole process ended up leaving a lot of early supporters
out in the cold. This is the coolest cooler on
the brink. Hey guys, I'm Jonathan Crickland and I'm Ariel Casting,
(00:56):
and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us this awesome suggestion. Yeah. Yeah,
this is a one that I have covered on my
show Text Stuff a little bit. I did an episode
about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes and failures, and spoiler alert,
coolest cooler falls into the latter a category. Yeah, sadly.
(01:18):
Sadly because I think the concept is really cool. Yeah,
we're gonna be saying cool a lot and not meaning
it in a punny way. But if you want to
interpret it as a pun, feel free. Yes, but no
I if I were not so thrifty, I was about
to say cheap, but I'm going to say thrifty. I
would have wanted to back this. A lot of people did.
(01:44):
Lots of people backed this product so much so that,
not to skip ahead too much, but it would become
one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history. We'll
get to that. But as it turns out, as as
we alluded to in the introduction, things did not go smoothly,
and it was largely a thing due to innocent naivete.
(02:06):
There was a lot of of of underestimating exactly how
hard it is to mass produce a brand new product.
I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan. So let's get
into a little bit of how this product came about.
This Coolest cooler. It was launched in two thousand thirteen
by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He used to be
a medical sales rep uh and he was a self
(02:29):
described inventor since two thousand and six, which is I
believe around the time that this product started taking form.
He's also um He's still listed as a member of
the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made up of
people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes, his
campaign was successful for the crowd funding part. I was
(02:51):
kind of surprised to see him still on there. But
spoiler alert, guys, coolest cooler is still around. Yeah, but
Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process.
So so his idea initially started off as a pair
of ideas before it merged into transformer like what the
(03:12):
coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to make
a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then he
made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh.
And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he
was like, well, I need to make them smaller so
I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration
that if he made it smaller, he could sell it.
(03:33):
And his idea was for the cooler to be a
place where people gather, to have all the things that
make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And
according to CNBC, his early experiments to compile all these
things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just have
this in my imagination. Now. I know this isn't what
(03:53):
it actually looked like, but in my imagination you have
like an iglue uh style cooler with a car stereo
duct taped onto it. Like, that's how I imagine these
early versions being That's how I'd do it, just just saying.
But the whole idea was, you know, you've been to
plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You note as well
(04:15):
as I do, that often a central gathering point for
a party ends up being the kitchen. It's it's kind
of it's where the food is, the is where the
drinks are. People tend to hover there and then sooner
or later a party kind of just it's centered there.
It might spin off in other places. So this was
kind of the same concept, was that if you have
(04:37):
all of these elements in a cooler and your outdoors,
the cooler becomes kind of the central focal point for
the party. Yeah, and he had an initial setup for
the cooler, but by the end of his Kickstarter campaigns
plural his cooler. His coolest cooler would include a USB
charging station, a blender for crushing ice, a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch,
(05:00):
a proof bluetooth speaker, and LED light for the lid,
dinner wear and storage for it. A cutting board of
bottle opener and all terrain wheels like a bungee cord
thingy and a little hidi spot for your keys and phone. Yeah.
Also it was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of
(05:20):
ridiculous if he made this cooler with all these bells
and whistles that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds
me of the trend It was before even smart watches,
but the trend where watches were including more and more features,
and the standard joke was what's the time? And then
the person exactly that was that was that was That's
(05:41):
a longstanding joke in technology. You've seen it in like,
you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort
of thing, Like if you had ended up with the
coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would
be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in
November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific
(06:02):
kind of of market. He was thinking about people who
liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along
with the holiday Christmas shopping, uh season. I mean you
think that would be a smart move, right, Yeah, But
it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out.
He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he
(06:26):
was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars and he
ultimately raised Uh. Well, the campaign met a hundred two
thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is
it's an all or nothing proposal. Do you either make
your goal or you get and you get whatever you
(06:49):
make plus over, or you make nothing at all. So
if you have a goal of fifty thou dollars and
you only hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no
money changes hand ends, and your campaign fails. If you
make fifty thou, then everyone gets charged however much they pledged.
You get your fifty dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I
(07:11):
think is five percent of the actual money earned. Yeah,
and if it makes more than fifty thou dollars, then
you get more than what you had set as your goal.
Kickstarter obviously has a strong incentive to promote the the
campaigns that are doing well. Like if there's a lot
(07:32):
of buzz, it makes a lot of sense for a
kick started to kind of let those closer to the
front thing that's comsion. They get exactly. Yeah, so if
it's a really successful one, then kicks Started gets a
bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent, but
it's five percent of a much larger number. And so
that first one didn't work out so well. But the
second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah. His second
(07:55):
campaign launched on July eighth, two fourteen. He set a
smaller goal, the thousand dollars, which just from the get
go that seems problematic to me. If you need two
d and fifty dollars to create your coolers, don't set
a lower goal so you meet your goal unless you're
specifically thinking I'm gonna start with a very small shipment,
(08:18):
like if you if you still kept the price point
or your cooler at the same level, but you thought
i'll make a smaller batch, then that might work out.
But as it turns out, that's not what happened. No, no,
So first I want to say it shows you how
small Ryan was thinking, because at his cheapest donation amount
five dollars, you gotta thanks in the promise of having
(08:40):
your name written on Ryan's personal cooler. Court cooler can
only hold so many names unless you're like one of
those grain of rice writers and even then um and
then the highest level if you donated two thousand dollars
or more, Ryan would come be your personal bartender for
an event in your hometown and give you one of
(09:02):
the first coolers and he would sign that one. And
he didn't have any of space. Yeah, and so you
look at this and you go obviously he was thinking
he'd get a moderate amount of backers two hundred and
eighty or so like his first campaign, maybe a little
bit more because he can't travel to that many people's hometowns.
And and he he had earned more than a hundred
(09:22):
thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded in the previous example.
So even if he got twice as many, you know,
you're still thinking, all right, a hundred thousand, maybe two
hundred thousand dollars, that's more or less on what he
on par with what he was looking at for the
first time. So he was he was thinking, let's try this,
and he he decided to launch it at a different
(09:43):
time of year, Yeah, because he was looking at the summer.
He was launching it right around you know, just after
the fourth of July weekend. You're talking about Prime Beach
going outdoor grilling kind of of time frame here. It's
when people are going outside and doing these activities where
they need to have a big cooler or wanting a
(10:05):
cooler they can crawl into and hide from the hot
Georgia summer. Yeah. Especially Yeah, once you get into the
heat and humidity here, you're looking for any relief available. Yeah.
He estimated that the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler.
This is from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way,
is still it's still something you can visit. You can
go and check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh
(10:26):
this particular campaign. Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer active.
Certain parts of the page you cannot access unless you
have donated. Yes, there there are messages that go out
just to backers, so if you are a backer you
have access to those, but the public facing page is
still available. So he estimated that the final retail cost
for the Coolest Cooler was going to be two uh So,
(10:50):
three hundred dollars for a cooler seems like a hefty
price tag, but as it turns out, it was also
an underestimation of how much he would need to charge
for that particular invention. I do want to say. I
went online and I did a little bit of research.
Some super high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds
(11:10):
of dollars. So it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's
more than I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah,
I mean, like, so there are products that cater to
people who have way more money than you and I
do and not very much idea of what to spend
it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's
(11:32):
not to say that those those products are no good
or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent
cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some
of them may be truly incredible and be much more
efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind
of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on
(11:53):
that campaign had an offer where if you were one
of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge
a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest
cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately, surprise. Yeah,
we cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So then
(12:15):
because they went so fast, and because the West coast
had not even had an opportunity to look at it,
because the campaign went live before most people on the
West coast of the United States had even woken up.
He decided to release another group, this time just twenty
slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super
fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say
(12:37):
you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a
big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your
next option would be to pledge at a level of
a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would
put you on the reservation list for your own coolest cooler.
So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen
dollars off the projected retail. Yeah, you would then also
(13:01):
have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which would
you could argue push the the price tag for the
coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how most
websites refer to it. It was a cooler yeah, still
not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um.
I think it was so popular because he took lessons
that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really
(13:23):
marketed the second one, well, he reached out to previous
backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media,
and he did live events all prior to actually launching
this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it
would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah.
They would tell people, oh, you know, I tried to
back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys
(13:43):
should get done on this, because think how incredible this
is going to be. And then it worked because some
news outlets, mostly local ones, were starting to pick it up,
and this would increase as the campaign would launch, and
in fact, it would turn into a frenzy when the
campaign was starting to get truly successful. So it became
a a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started
(14:07):
picking up steam, it was getting a lot of backers
that in turn was notable enough to get the attention
of the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought
even more people to back it. So it started to
kind of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well,
and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its
school in four days. Within four days that had made
(14:27):
three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more
than a whole lot. And by the end of the
two month campaign, it had raised thirteen million, two hundred
five th two hundred and twenty six dollars from over
sixty thousand backers, and once it beat out Pebbles Watch
as the most successful kickstarter of all time at that time,
(14:48):
it got a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even
named it one of the best inventions of two tho. Yeah,
they did this in two thousand four. Um. Yeah is
before before this had really even had a chance to
prove itself. And so then they began to work on
(15:09):
finalizing the actual design of the products. And now they
got the money to go into the process of making
the thing. Yeah, And they worked with a studio, Fathom
to get their prototype out, which had fifty parts in it. Um.
And this is so that Time magazine could photograph it
for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of
a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had
(15:30):
pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this
was redesigned so um and and through all this so
he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned
appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought
he had sourcing partners in place based on the money
that he made, and he was so optimistic that he figured,
(15:51):
unlike of crowdfunny campaigns that face delays, he would be
able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and yeah
he was wrong. He had planned on starting to deliver
coolers by February two. But if you know anything about
this story, you know that was are too optimistic. And
if you don't know anything about this story, we'll tell
(16:11):
you about it. First. We're going to take a quick break,
al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign. It is
monumentally successful, as an enormous following, lots of enthusiastic backers
who just can't wait to get their hands on this
(16:33):
cooler that can do everything, uh that you can imagine
and be prepared to live their best beach clad lives.
The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine. I don't
think it could walk a puppy for you, nor could
it actually transport you to the beach, but just about
everything else that ever. Yeah, So what happened, Well, he
(16:55):
immediately started to encounter issues in manufacture ring and this
is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got
a lot of moving pieces. Right, You've got your whole
supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a
relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear,
(17:16):
where you know you've you've got you get the raw
materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility,
It then goes into the shipping department of that facility,
and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple.
But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts
to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB
charging UH outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah,
(17:37):
it's got all these different parts and they were coming
from different places, which means if there's a delay and
any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product.
And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that
made the blender motor, which there was one place that
he sourced for this one place. Only he had no
backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so
(17:57):
high he wanted to be really good auction Um they
went on strike and so it stopped his entire his
entire line of assembly, which also took a really long
time because they had fifty parts, a lot of which
had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever looked
at the Coolest cooler online, like you've gone to Amazon,
where you can still see coolest coolers listed, although if
(18:20):
you want one of the classic ones, typically you're looking
at buying it from a reseller. But if you look
at it, you'll see that there are a couple of
different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest Cooler that
has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part, and
it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with the blender. Well,
the one that was on the Kickstarter page. One of
the backers backed specifically mentioned that the blender was part
(18:43):
of it. So that was a big issue with the
the supply chain for the blender motor all all uh
screwed up. It really put him behind. But even still
he was estimating that by September. By September he could
get everybody there coolers and that did not happen, No,
(19:04):
not at all. Um everything was a lot more expensive
then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail price turned
out to be too low. That and in fact, he
said this over and over again, So one of the
biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated how
expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and that
(19:25):
it was an issue where if you did the math,
there was no way around it. You were going to
lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This
was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering
the expense of the materials and labor to put the
product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on those sales.
(19:48):
And I mean, it does not take a business major
to tell you that you can't stay in business that way.
You you're bleeding money being in business. You cannot. You
can't make it up in volume. That's just gonna bleed
you out faster. So this is where he had to
start figuring out what do I do about this? Well,
(20:13):
he had another idea that again kind of makes sense
but also made a lot of people angry. He decided
to sell his cooler on Amazon because that way he
could sell it at a higher price than what he
listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit on the
coolers and then use that money on making and shipping
these individual coolers to people. To get all of the
(20:34):
coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah, because
he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah. So
essentially this was the reason this caused such as a fuss,
is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter.
I can't speak for everybody, but I notice in general
(20:54):
that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is an
early access store. That's not what starters. You're an investor
in an idea, Yeah, and you sometimes investments don't pay off.
I mean, We've done plenty of episodes of the Brink
where that has turned out to be true. You've backed
some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go into my
(21:15):
personal history and how many watches I have backed that
never came out. But the campaigns are successful, Yes they were.
I I think there are three different watch campaigns I
backed that did not ever ship. I think that just
makes you an expert on the topic. But again, I
didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere down
(21:37):
the line something like this could happen where I'm giving
I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds.
But there are a lot of factors out there that
don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the
business owner that can sink a business, right. You also
have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake
(21:59):
oil salesman, who they're selling an idea but they don't
have any any intention of seeing it through. I never
got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No,
I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to
set this up to be successful or as successful as
it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that
he expected and the money that he he was originally
(22:22):
estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he
could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But
the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that
was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around
his neck. And so the whole goal of any business
(22:43):
oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to
have a sustainable business on the other side of it, right,
So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't
just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to
create a viable business where he be selling these coolers
to other retailers and that the people who backed it
(23:06):
their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler
at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he
was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers,
he wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those
those Backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are
(23:26):
upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is
not coming to their to their house when they expected it.
And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in
theory go out and order one and get one ahead
of them. Yeah, in two weeks or or a couple
of days. You have a note here, And I think
(23:46):
it's true that a big part of the issue was communication.
There are their notes and their comments about we haven't
heard anything. And so they did do a live stream
to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more
dollars than we expect it. We're trying to get it
through selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards.
They and they did, they send out some rewards early on,
(24:07):
and it just it got too big for them. Well,
and and that also ended up being an issue, like
there was no good way for Creeper to get out
of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people
these coolers, and he could only do them in batches,
and so what would happen is you would send out
you would have this company sending out coolers to backers
(24:29):
in these smaller batches. But the media focus was on
how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It
wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know,
ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to
get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was
fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which
(24:49):
wasn't doing him or his company any favors. So again, like, yes,
the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility
off of him and say like he was a victim
in all of this. But at the same time, I
think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a
worst case scenario for him to have to deal with
on top of all just the production headaches he had. Well,
(25:12):
he does, he does. I don't know if it's victim
blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he he
has been noted to say that he thinks part of
what has delayed him so long is that when he
put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers went
on and made these horrible reviews because they said they
didn't have their coolers, and he's like, guys, you're shooting
yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just delaying
(25:34):
when I can get enough money to make good on
the promise I've made you. But then again, if I
were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will get
you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote unquote
retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah, so
that was something else that came up with that. He said.
One solution to the problem they had was that if
you were a backer and you wanted your cooler faster,
(25:57):
you could get it by giving an extra nineties seven
dollars to the company. That would make up enough of
the difference for him to be able to put those
people on a priority list and they would get their
coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again,
the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it
sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties dollars,
(26:19):
you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case.
It was if you want your cooler now, you have
to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient,
you can wait and it may take a while, but
at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I
wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it, where
the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a
(26:40):
little sore, I mean, probably not. It was, it was.
It's very easy to get the the idea that the
company was bleeding backers dry. But again, the more I
look into it, the less I feel like that's the case,
and the more I feel like there was no good
pathway out of this this whole Okay, So after all this,
(27:04):
they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They
had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd
be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how
did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean,
there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers.
I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But
(27:26):
they began to sell the model of the cooler that
was covered by the kick starting campaign for four d
eight five dollars on their site, which if you look
at the if you look at the initial projected retail
price of to I'm pretty sure fo is more than that.
(27:50):
I'm an English major. But that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah,
just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows
that at this cooler and all the parts that were
necessary in order to put it together and to have
it do all the things that was supposed to do,
that it was way more expensive to produce than what
he had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into
(28:14):
lessons at the end of the episode, but one thing
this immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking
about really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making
something physical, you should grossly overestimate how much it's going
to cost you to make it, because it will prepare
you better to when you encounter those problems to manage
(28:36):
them well. And then if you do have if you
do have a surplus at the end of it, if
everything goes as you expected and not as you planned for,
and then you can either give it back to your
supporters or you can invest it in your company to
be more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other
people who know what they're doing instead of just like
your own. Research is good, but also talk to industry experts.
(28:58):
But you know, i'd have imagine that there were there
was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this
failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had You even
had people who were ordering it and uh and you
know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead
(29:18):
of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler
is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but
it might not be cool enough to justify the cost.
So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it
even take even longer to to make good on these
these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or
(29:41):
a ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect.
If something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects
and ultimately the people that it is affecting the most,
at least in the eyes of the backers, are the backers. Yeah,
which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to
tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So
(30:04):
when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we
mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he
was operating out of, and Oregon has been the home,
not just of Grepper, but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes,
he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the
(30:25):
Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints
were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah,
because if you've got an issue with a company, you've
got to file it where that company is. Yeah, So
from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon. Uh, And
the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent
(30:46):
in delivering their product. So that was enough to to
inspire the d o J and Oregon to launch an
investigation in two So Kickstar, by the way, their policy
the states that any successful campaign is supposed to either
deliver the awards to backers that were promised or offer
(31:09):
refunds to backers. And so part of the problem here
was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints,
was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented.
I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem
that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully
(31:32):
fund your project, you either have to make good on
these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers.
So it's what gave a foothold for the d o
J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now,
in two thousand six, Um Coolest Cooler did try to
a piece people again. They added a tracking tool to
(31:54):
their website for backers to track where the progress of
their delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah,
you could see your place in line basically. But then
they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed
and shipping these things. They were going by address, which
makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not
great if you happen to be like if you had
(32:15):
prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's
say that you were one of those first seventy, like
you were an early bird backer, but because of your address,
you were not at the top of that list. You
might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part
of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um.
They also tried to put on that tool on their
(32:36):
website where all of the money raised had gone, to
give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really
help much because they're employees of coolest cooler that we're
getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats from
some angry consumers. Yeah. Yeah, people, man, when they don't
get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast.
(32:56):
And I mean I get the frustration, trust me, I
could the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting
what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also
and at least one of those instances, did not get
a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The
I cannot have any recourse for that because the company
(33:17):
that was supposed to make the thing I backed no
longer exists, so there's no one for me to get
money from at this point. It's just it's the risk
of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's
again you have to remember it's not a store, right.
So but there are people who they have that expectation
(33:38):
and they're like, well, I bought this product and you
won't give it to me, So therefore I it's fair game.
I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out
at you because you have taken my money, which you know,
so these people who filed with the organ Department of
Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less
(34:00):
like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah. Yeah, so how did
that turn out? Um, well, you know, at least turned
out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department
of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at
least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest
(34:21):
Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case.
But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong
agreements that he had to abide by. One of those
was that, uh, he was going to have to ship
Coolest coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that
included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon.
(34:45):
He also agreed that if backers in general did not
receive their coolers by the middle of twenty so we
still have some time to go. Yeah, Like, while we're
researching this episode, there are people actively posting on the
cool Cooler Kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah,
well there's thousands of them, but that anyway, if he
(35:07):
does not get the coolers to the backers by mid
twenty for every backer who has not received his or
her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from Grebber and
no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy or if
it's still solvent, he will owe that money. If the
company goes into bankruptcy, it will not protect him from
(35:28):
that that uh obligation. He will still have to pay
the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people
were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope
to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore,
like I don't care about this cooler anymore, and is
a small amount of their investment back, but it's something Well,
(35:48):
and you know, the idea would be that assuming the
company was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars
being sent, it would still the cooler would still be
on its way at some point. Yeah, so it's not
like here's twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah,
assuming that the company is still around. Of course, if
it were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's
(36:10):
personal funds. I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote
a letter to people and he put it on the
Kickstarter as an update to all the backers, and he
explained their plan and he explained there strategies for going
forward to get this done, things like going international and
things like that, more investors and stuff, but he was
(36:30):
really salty about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that
this is how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that
we aren't shysters. We generally want to get you your product. Yeah,
we just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right. Yeah,
I like like the you know, we're trying to do
good on the agreement we had, but the more you
(36:52):
guys put up a fuss, the harder it is for
us to do that. Yeah. It's kind of like, uh,
like you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to
the water park in the afternoon, but it's still in
the morning and you need to do some errands, and
the toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know,
I want to go to the water parks. Says yes,
we're going to the water park, but first we have
to run errands. But I want to go to the
(37:13):
water park. I mean, mind you if I had been
promised to go to the water park in two thousand
fourteen and I hit two thousand sixteen, it's a very
long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler,
time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow,
in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed
on change dot org to get them to stop selling
(37:36):
their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes
no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you
your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the
idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing
that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers and
get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the
(37:57):
way the world works. No, no, but Grebber, you know
obvious Lee didn't listen to that. The petition didn't It
didn't change well, I mean, it's a petition. It's a petition,
doesn't doesn't have any holding value over anything other than
letting you know. There's a lot of people who are
ticked off enough to fill out a form. So, in
addition to trying to boost international sales, get more investors,
(38:17):
reduced production costs, all of which are great ideas, although
hard to get investors when you've got a bad reputation
um Greber started innovating more to try to get more money,
so he made peripherals like batteries and solar panels and
charging chords for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler,
which is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently
is like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the
(38:40):
full coolest coolers. Yes, and it has like a universal
attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike
or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he
could use profits from that or revenue from the sales
of those products to help again make good on these backers.
That I have a feeling that that should the day
come when Greber is able to send off that final
(39:01):
backer cooler, it will be an enormous weight off his shoulders. So, Jonathan,
how many people would you suppose don't have their coolers yet? Well,
it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing
tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten lateen
there was an article that stated as many as twenty
(39:23):
thousand people were still waiting for their cooler. Yeah, that's
a lot of people. So it's about a third of
the backers who who pledged at a level that was
enough to get a cooler in the first place. So
two thirds got their coolers, a third are still waiting. Um,
so that's tough. And there was an article and so
(39:45):
the Oregonian was the newspaper that published the report that
said twenty thousand people were still waiting. A few months later,
they published a second article that stated that during the
most recent quarter, according to a statement from Coolest Cooler,
the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobackers in that
(40:06):
most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able to do
any in that three month period. So obviously every month
that goes by is bringing them closer to that mid
twenty twenty deadline that they need to make. And um,
there have been a lot of other things that have
happened over the last couple of years that have added complications.
(40:27):
For example, you probably are familiar that there have been
some issues about tariffs and China, as as the United
States of America has enacted certain policies that have instituted
these tariffs that in turn ends up impacting the supply
chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers, so which
(40:48):
that is not now there's nothing he can do about
it other than like he trying desperately to find a
way to still stay within budget and be able to
continue production. It's not like it halts production, but it
makes production more expensive. And since that was the problem
in the first place, in addition to the timing issues
with things like the strike, uh, that does not make
(41:09):
his life any easier. Yeah. Again, I really think the
lesson here is give yourself buffer, give yourself a leg up. Yeah, overestimate,
like you said, how much it's gonna call you talk
to people. Give yourself a longer deadline too. You know,
if backers know that going in, they might be okay
(41:30):
with that. Yeah. It's it's when you start changing things
and people had. It's when you set certain expectations and
then you have to change those expectations. That's always a problem,
and I've seen it on multiple Kickstarter campaigns, and it
almost always happens with stuff that's related to producing something physical.
And it doesn't have to be complicated either. I've backed
(41:51):
Kickstarter campaigns that were producing things like a deck of cards,
but then there are printer issues, their quality control issues,
and these things slow everything down and they increase the
costs because you have to pay for another production run
because if it's not going to meet the expectations of
your backers, then you're going to have problems that like you,
(42:12):
you either ship nothing and you tell your backers were sorry,
but the quality was not up to our standards, so
we're going to go back and try it again, or
you end up shipping something that is of substandard quality
and your backers get upset anyway because they're like, backed this,
that was a waste of money and a really long wait.
And also you know the lesson for you, uh you
(42:33):
know you've listened to this episodes so you know, but
realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning
money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're
hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah,
you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can
I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is
it okay if this money never comes back to me? Like?
(42:54):
If I if I make this pledge, and what for
whatever reason the act will endeavor fails despite the campaign
being successful, Am I okay with taking a loss of this?
If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until
it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly so in this case
with coolest cooler, if you saw it and you thought, wow,
(43:17):
that sounds really awesome and I would love to have
one of these, and it would be nice to get
it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of
the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production.
Then you might think, well, is it is it worth
potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail
(43:39):
price or is it better for me to wait, because
it could be that instead of saving a d fifteen
dollars and throwing away a Yeah, policies are great, but
the truth of the matter is, no matter how well
intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter,
if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not
(44:01):
even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living
under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's
just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting
to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the
last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more
established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to
(44:22):
raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is.
Often the thing has already made. They're using it to
kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is
so that they know how much of it to make
or whether or not it's going to be a successful product.
And so it's it's changing where it was kind of
(44:43):
aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea,
Like you have an idea for something, you launched this
crowdfunding campaign to get the money you need to actually
bring that something into reality, and then you ship off
or you start selling or whatever. Now it's companies are
using it almost as a marketing tool, and so it's
(45:04):
it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in the like
I said, in the last couple of years. But we
still have these issues and uh. And there are no
shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across as kind
of scammy, so that's also good. Although to be fair,
both Kickstarter and indiego go and others have gotten a
(45:26):
lot better at weeding those out. Although indigo go you
can get your funding amount even if you don't magic Yeah,
if you don't. If you said you can, you can
choose if you set Let's say you set a ten
thousand dollar goal but you only raise five thousand dollars,
and it's on indiegog. You can choose to accept any
amount raised even if you haven't met your goal, but
(45:48):
it's with a heftier fee taken out. For indie go go,
they take a much larger percentage of the money, so
you get you get even less. So if you ask
for ten thousand dollars and you end up getting five
thousand dollars, you might only end up with four thousand dollars.
So it's it's one of those things that it's kind
of a slippery slope issue. Um, we have a couple
(46:10):
of fun facts and I just read them and now
I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The first is Ryan Grabber
has backed his own kickstarters. Uh, he backed the potato
salad kickstarter. That's the one that gets me mad. It
is because Jonathan had a kickstarter around the same time
and his didn't get funded. But this darn potatoes salad
kickstar was a choke. The potato salad was a choke,
(46:32):
and then it got it got ridiculous. Not just backing
it was again like a crazy viral success for a
joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did take all
the funds and make a major party out of it.
All props, all props to that guy and and his
joke and the fact that it brought joy to people.
(46:55):
But I am I am unapologetically envious because I had
a project. It was near and dear to both of
our hearts. It was that I was really hoping I
could get funded, and it uh. It also managed to
buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where it
needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It was
(47:15):
make or break. And the reason why I say it
broke some trends is that, generally speaking, on Kickstarter, if
you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding,
and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of
campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll
get all the way to funding by the end. Mine
(47:37):
was not one of those. I'm really sad about that too.
So we'll move on to our last fact and then
we'll wrap things up. The original version of the Coolest
Cooler had an attached to grill yeah, which turns out
probably not the best idea for a product that's mostly
made out of blast it was nixed for. Yeah, you
can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean, you
can maybe have like a stand alone little stand and
(48:02):
grill that you could put over a fire pit or something,
but even then you'd have to have it cool down
enough to be able to put it against a plastic cooler. Um.
So that wraps up our discussion about the coolest cooler.
But before we go and wrap everything up for the episode,
we also wanted to give an update about a previous
topic that we've covered. We did an episode about Toys
(48:24):
r Us and we talked about how at the end
of that episode, we talked about how UH there was
an effort to kind of bring these sort of pop
up stores to life, targets and things like that, and
the Toys r Us name might not be totally gone.
And now we've gotten word for the heads up as
of the recording of this podcast, which is on June one,
(48:44):
two thousand nineteen, that there is a a sincere effort
to bring back uh a larger version of Toys r Us,
although not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah,
there will be about the third of the size of
the old toy stores with more experience points, play areas
and things like that. And also they're looking at bringing
(49:04):
back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back
by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen. So we'll
have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does,
we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll
have to do an episode at some point where it's
it's all follow ups on brand. I was thinking the
same thing. Clearly Canadian would be another one. Thanks for
the shout out, clearly, we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I
(49:27):
still haven't received any crates of drinks or anything. You
don't listen to him. I totally gave him a BlackBerry,
clearly Canadian. That's not a crate. That was one drink
and it was from you, not from clearly. Not that
we do this to get stuck from companies. We're just joking.
We don't expect nor do we deserve anything from anybody.
But let's say that you wanted out there. You and
(49:49):
listener Land wanted to give us a suggestion for something
we should cover in a future episode of The Brink.
How would they reach out to us, Well, they could
email us at feedback at the Brink Podcast Dot show yep,
and you can go to our website that's the Brink
Podcast dot Show. It has an archive of all of
our previously published episodes. Got information about your beloved hosts
(50:11):
and other interesting things you can check out. And that
wraps this up until next time. I have been Jonathan
Strict and I've been aerial casting
Ryan Grepper was sure he knew how to beat the
heat with an innovative approach to the old beach standby
the drinks cooler. He added some bells and whistles, updating
the frosty concept with some picky bonus features. To get
things moving, he launched a crowdfunding campaign that was incredibly
successful and earned a lot of ice, but soon found
(00:34):
out that manufacturing a new product isn't easy and the
whole process ended up leaving a lot of early supporters
out in the cold. This is the coolest cooler on
the brink. Hey guys, I'm Jonathan Crickland and I'm Ariel Casting,
(00:56):
and thank you Bill Jeffers for giving us this awesome suggestion. Yeah. Yeah,
this is a one that I have covered on my
show Text Stuff a little bit. I did an episode
about some of crowdfunding's biggest successes and failures, and spoiler alert,
coolest cooler falls into the latter a category. Yeah, sadly.
(01:18):
Sadly because I think the concept is really cool. Yeah,
we're gonna be saying cool a lot and not meaning
it in a punny way. But if you want to
interpret it as a pun, feel free. Yes, but no
I if I were not so thrifty, I was about
to say cheap, but I'm going to say thrifty. I
would have wanted to back this. A lot of people did.
(01:44):
Lots of people backed this product so much so that,
not to skip ahead too much, but it would become
one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history. We'll
get to that. But as it turns out, as as
we alluded to in the introduction, things did not go smoothly,
and it was largely a thing due to innocent naivete.
(02:06):
There was a lot of of of underestimating exactly how
hard it is to mass produce a brand new product.
I'd have to agree with you, Jonathan. So let's get
into a little bit of how this product came about.
This Coolest cooler. It was launched in two thousand thirteen
by Ryan Grepper from Portland, Oregon. He used to be
a medical sales rep uh and he was a self
(02:29):
described inventor since two thousand and six, which is I
believe around the time that this product started taking form.
He's also um He's still listed as a member of
the CNBC Tech Crowd Council, which is made up of
people who have done a successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yes, his
campaign was successful for the crowd funding part. I was
(02:51):
kind of surprised to see him still on there. But
spoiler alert, guys, coolest cooler is still around. Yeah, but
Ryan Grepper's reputation has taken an enormous beating in the process.
So so his idea initially started off as a pair
of ideas before it merged into transformer like what the
(03:12):
coolest cooler would be? Right? Yeah, he tried to make
a portable blender from a weed whacker, and then he
made a cooler with the car stereo in it. Uh.
And then after he made these these initial prototypes, he
was like, well, I need to make them smaller so
I can bring them places. And he got the inspiration
that if he made it smaller, he could sell it.
(03:33):
And his idea was for the cooler to be a
place where people gather, to have all the things that
make a space somewhere you'd want to hang out. And
according to CNBC, his early experiments to compile all these
things together didn't work. So well, yeah, I just have
this in my imagination. Now. I know this isn't what
(03:53):
it actually looked like, but in my imagination you have
like an iglue uh style cooler with a car stereo
duct taped onto it. Like, that's how I imagine these
early versions being That's how I'd do it, just just saying.
But the whole idea was, you know, you've been to
plenty of parties, you've hosted parties. You note as well
(04:15):
as I do, that often a central gathering point for
a party ends up being the kitchen. It's it's kind
of it's where the food is, the is where the
drinks are. People tend to hover there and then sooner
or later a party kind of just it's centered there.
It might spin off in other places. So this was
kind of the same concept, was that if you have
(04:37):
all of these elements in a cooler and your outdoors,
the cooler becomes kind of the central focal point for
the party. Yeah, and he had an initial setup for
the cooler, but by the end of his Kickstarter campaigns
plural his cooler. His coolest cooler would include a USB
charging station, a blender for crushing ice, a waterproof bluetooth speaker, watch,
(05:00):
a proof bluetooth speaker, and LED light for the lid,
dinner wear and storage for it. A cutting board of
bottle opener and all terrain wheels like a bungee cord
thingy and a little hidi spot for your keys and phone. Yeah.
Also it was cooler. Yeah, it would be kind of
(05:20):
ridiculous if he made this cooler with all these bells
and whistles that didn't actually keep your beverages. It reminds
me of the trend It was before even smart watches,
but the trend where watches were including more and more features,
and the standard joke was what's the time? And then
the person exactly that was that was that was That's
(05:41):
a longstanding joke in technology. You've seen it in like,
you know, comic strips and things like that, same sort
of thing, Like if you had ended up with the
coolest cooler that couldn't actually keep food cold, that would
be ridiculous. So he initially launched a crowdfunding campaign in
November two thousand thirteen, and he was targeting a specific
(06:02):
kind of of market. He was thinking about people who
liked tailgating, and he was timing it to go along
with the holiday Christmas shopping, uh season. I mean you
think that would be a smart move, right, Yeah, But
it turns out it didn't. It didn't quite pan out.
He did not make his goal on that. Yeah, he
(06:26):
was seeking a hundred twenty five thousand dollars and he
ultimately raised Uh. Well, the campaign met a hundred two
thousand from two backers. But the way kickstarter works is
it's an all or nothing proposal. Do you either make
your goal or you get and you get whatever you
(06:49):
make plus over, or you make nothing at all. So
if you have a goal of fifty thou dollars and
you only hit twenty thousand dollars, nobody gets charged, no
money changes hand ends, and your campaign fails. If you
make fifty thou, then everyone gets charged however much they pledged.
You get your fifty dollars minus kickstarters cut, which I
(07:11):
think is five percent of the actual money earned. Yeah,
and if it makes more than fifty thou dollars, then
you get more than what you had set as your goal.
Kickstarter obviously has a strong incentive to promote the the
campaigns that are doing well. Like if there's a lot
(07:32):
of buzz, it makes a lot of sense for a
kick started to kind of let those closer to the
front thing that's comsion. They get exactly. Yeah, so if
it's a really successful one, then kicks Started gets a
bigger cut, because I mean it's still five percent, but
it's five percent of a much larger number. And so
that first one didn't work out so well. But the
second Kickstarter campaign was a different story. Yeah. His second
(07:55):
campaign launched on July eighth, two fourteen. He set a
smaller goal, the thousand dollars, which just from the get
go that seems problematic to me. If you need two
d and fifty dollars to create your coolers, don't set
a lower goal so you meet your goal unless you're
specifically thinking I'm gonna start with a very small shipment,
(08:18):
like if you if you still kept the price point
or your cooler at the same level, but you thought
i'll make a smaller batch, then that might work out.
But as it turns out, that's not what happened. No, no,
So first I want to say it shows you how
small Ryan was thinking, because at his cheapest donation amount
five dollars, you gotta thanks in the promise of having
(08:40):
your name written on Ryan's personal cooler. Court cooler can
only hold so many names unless you're like one of
those grain of rice writers and even then um and
then the highest level if you donated two thousand dollars
or more, Ryan would come be your personal bartender for
an event in your hometown and give you one of
(09:02):
the first coolers and he would sign that one. And
he didn't have any of space. Yeah, and so you
look at this and you go obviously he was thinking
he'd get a moderate amount of backers two hundred and
eighty or so like his first campaign, maybe a little
bit more because he can't travel to that many people's hometowns.
And and he he had earned more than a hundred
(09:22):
thousand dollars had the campaign succeeded in the previous example.
So even if he got twice as many, you know,
you're still thinking, all right, a hundred thousand, maybe two
hundred thousand dollars, that's more or less on what he
on par with what he was looking at for the
first time. So he was he was thinking, let's try this,
and he he decided to launch it at a different
(09:43):
time of year, Yeah, because he was looking at the summer.
He was launching it right around you know, just after
the fourth of July weekend. You're talking about Prime Beach
going outdoor grilling kind of of time frame here. It's
when people are going outside and doing these activities where
they need to have a big cooler or wanting a
(10:05):
cooler they can crawl into and hide from the hot
Georgia summer. Yeah. Especially Yeah, once you get into the
heat and humidity here, you're looking for any relief available. Yeah.
He estimated that the final retail cost of the Coolest Cooler.
This is from the Kickstarter page, which, by the way,
is still it's still something you can visit. You can
go and check out the Kickstarter page for this, uh
(10:26):
this particular campaign. Kickstar keeps them all. It's no longer active.
Certain parts of the page you cannot access unless you
have donated. Yes, there there are messages that go out
just to backers, so if you are a backer you
have access to those, but the public facing page is
still available. So he estimated that the final retail cost
for the Coolest Cooler was going to be two uh So,
(10:50):
three hundred dollars for a cooler seems like a hefty
price tag, but as it turns out, it was also
an underestimation of how much he would need to charge
for that particular invention. I do want to say. I
went online and I did a little bit of research.
Some super high end, super large coolers do cost hundreds
(11:10):
of dollars. So it's not a completely unreasonable price. It's
more than I probably would want to pay for a cooler. Yeah,
I mean, like, so there are products that cater to
people who have way more money than you and I
do and not very much idea of what to spend
it on. I'll put it that way. That's not it's
(11:32):
not to say that those those products are no good
or that they're only marginally better than say, a decent
cooler would run you. I don't know. There are some
of them may be truly incredible and be much more
efficient and managing you know, heat and all that kind
of stuff. I don't know. But uh. He also on
(11:53):
that campaign had an offer where if you were one
of the first fifty people to pledge, you could pledge
a hundred sixty five dollars and get a reserved coolest
cooler of your own. Uh. Those fifty slots disappeared almost immediately, surprise. Yeah,
we cooler is a lot more palatable. Yeah. So then
(12:15):
because they went so fast, and because the West coast
had not even had an opportunity to look at it,
because the campaign went live before most people on the
West coast of the United States had even woken up.
He decided to release another group, this time just twenty
slots for more early bird coolers, and those went super
fast to the next amount you could pledge. Let's say
(12:37):
you missed out on those seventy, which wouldn't be a
big surprise. I mean, they did go super fast. Your
next option would be to pledge at a level of
a hundred eighty five dollars or more, and that would
put you on the reservation list for your own coolest cooler.
So again you're you're still looking at a hundred fifteen
dollars off the projected retail. Yeah, you would then also
(13:01):
have to kick in fifteen dollars for shipping, which would
you could argue push the the price tag for the
coolest cooler to two hundred dollars. And that's how most
websites refer to it. It was a cooler yeah, still
not still not horrible, Still a pretty big discount. Um.
I think it was so popular because he took lessons
that he learned from his first Kickstarter and and really
(13:23):
marketed the second one, well, he reached out to previous
backers and enthusiasts through email, he hit up social media,
and he did live events all prior to actually launching
this campaign, So anybody who was already excited about it
would then be excited at their friends about it. Yeah.
They would tell people, oh, you know, I tried to
back this last time. It didn't work out. You guys
(13:43):
should get done on this, because think how incredible this
is going to be. And then it worked because some
news outlets, mostly local ones, were starting to pick it up,
and this would increase as the campaign would launch, and
in fact, it would turn into a frenzy when the
campaign was starting to get truly successful. So it became
a a self perpetuating cycle, right because the campaign started
(14:07):
picking up steam, it was getting a lot of backers
that in turn was notable enough to get the attention
of the media that hadn't already covered this, which brought
even more people to back it. So it started to
kind of become a spinning boulder down the hill situation. Well,
and it became a spinning baller quickly. It beat its
school in four days. Within four days that had made
(14:27):
three point two million dollars. Yeah, that's a lot more
than a whole lot. And by the end of the
two month campaign, it had raised thirteen million, two hundred
five th two hundred and twenty six dollars from over
sixty thousand backers, and once it beat out Pebbles Watch
as the most successful kickstarter of all time at that time,
(14:48):
it got a ton more press coverage. Time magazine even
named it one of the best inventions of two tho. Yeah,
they did this in two thousand four. Um. Yeah is
before before this had really even had a chance to
prove itself. And so then they began to work on
(15:09):
finalizing the actual design of the products. And now they
got the money to go into the process of making
the thing. Yeah, And they worked with a studio, Fathom
to get their prototype out, which had fifty parts in it. Um.
And this is so that Time magazine could photograph it
for the article. Yeah. It's hard to take pictures of
a thing that's largely theoretical. Yeah, I mean they had
(15:30):
pictures of the original design of the cooler, but this
was redesigned so um and and through all this so
he has this successful campaign. Ryan thought he had planned
appropriately for supply and logistics ahead of time. He thought
he had sourcing partners in place based on the money
that he made, and he was so optimistic that he figured,
(15:51):
unlike of crowdfunny campaigns that face delays, he would be
able to avoid them. Yeah he was wrong, and yeah
he was wrong. He had planned on starting to deliver
coolers by February two. But if you know anything about
this story, you know that was are too optimistic. And
if you don't know anything about this story, we'll tell
(16:11):
you about it. First. We're going to take a quick break,
al right. So Grebber has this crowdfunding campaign. It is
monumentally successful, as an enormous following, lots of enthusiastic backers
who just can't wait to get their hands on this
(16:33):
cooler that can do everything, uh that you can imagine
and be prepared to live their best beach clad lives.
The cooler cannot do everything you could imagine. I don't
think it could walk a puppy for you, nor could
it actually transport you to the beach, but just about
everything else that ever. Yeah, So what happened, Well, he
(16:55):
immediately started to encounter issues in manufacture ring and this
is a good time to remember that manufacturing has got
a lot of moving pieces. Right, You've got your whole
supply chain. Now, it's one thing if you're making a
relatively simple product, where the supply chain is is pretty linear,
(17:16):
where you know you've you've got you get the raw
materials from one place, it goes into a manufacturing facility,
It then goes into the shipping department of that facility,
and then it goes out to customers. That's really simple.
But the coolest cooler had a lot of different parts
to it. It had these speakers, it had the USB
charging UH outlets, it had a motor for the blender. Yeah,
(17:37):
it's got all these different parts and they were coming
from different places, which means if there's a delay and
any part of that supply chain, it delays the overall product.
And there was so the manufacturing facility in China that
made the blender motor, which there was one place that
he sourced for this one place. Only he had no
backups because his specifications for this blender motor were so
(17:57):
high he wanted to be really good auction Um they
went on strike and so it stopped his entire his
entire line of assembly, which also took a really long
time because they had fifty parts, a lot of which
had to be hand assembled. Now, if you've ever looked
at the Coolest cooler online, like you've gone to Amazon,
where you can still see coolest coolers listed, although if
(18:20):
you want one of the classic ones, typically you're looking
at buying it from a reseller. But if you look
at it, you'll see that there are a couple of
different configurations. There's one version of the Coolest Cooler that
has a regular top, doesn't have the blender part, and
it's significantly cheaper than the one that comes with the blender. Well,
the one that was on the Kickstarter page. One of
the backers backed specifically mentioned that the blender was part
(18:43):
of it. So that was a big issue with the
the supply chain for the blender motor all all uh
screwed up. It really put him behind. But even still
he was estimating that by September. By September he could
get everybody there coolers and that did not happen, No,
(19:04):
not at all. Um everything was a lot more expensive
then he anticipated. Yeah, so that final retail price turned
out to be too low. That and in fact, he
said this over and over again, So one of the
biggest problems he had was that he had underestimated how
expensive it would be to produce these coolers, and that
(19:25):
it was an issue where if you did the math,
there was no way around it. You were going to
lose money on those Kickstarter orders like there was. This
was beyond selling things at cost where you're just covering
the expense of the materials and labor to put the
product together. Now you're actually taking a bath on those sales.
(19:48):
And I mean, it does not take a business major
to tell you that you can't stay in business that way.
You you're bleeding money being in business. You cannot. You
can't make it up in volume. That's just gonna bleed
you out faster. So this is where he had to
start figuring out what do I do about this? Well,
(20:13):
he had another idea that again kind of makes sense
but also made a lot of people angry. He decided
to sell his cooler on Amazon because that way he
could sell it at a higher price than what he
listed on Kickstarter and make up some profit on the
coolers and then use that money on making and shipping
these individual coolers to people. To get all of the
(20:34):
coolers for all the Kickstarter people to them. Yeah, because
he didn't have the money to do it. Yeah. So
essentially this was the reason this caused such as a fuss,
is that the people who were backing it on Kickstarter.
I can't speak for everybody, but I notice in general
(20:54):
that a lot of people act like Kickstarter is an
early access store. That's not what starters. You're an investor
in an idea, Yeah, and you sometimes investments don't pay off.
I mean, We've done plenty of episodes of the Brink
where that has turned out to be true. You've backed
some some campaigns that didn't. Let's not go into my
(21:15):
personal history and how many watches I have backed that
never came out. But the campaigns are successful, Yes they were.
I I think there are three different watch campaigns I
backed that did not ever ship. I think that just
makes you an expert on the topic. But again, I
didn't knowing that there was the possibility that somewhere down
(21:37):
the line something like this could happen where I'm giving
I'm pledging money to a business that I hope succeeds.
But there are a lot of factors out there that
don't have anything to do with the sincerity of the
business owner that can sink a business, right. You also
have people out there who are disingenuous, who are snake
(21:59):
oil salesman, who they're selling an idea but they don't
have any any intention of seeing it through. I never
got the feeling that Grebber was one of those people. No,
I really think he just lacked the business knowledge to
set this up to be successful or as successful as
it was. Maybe if he had the low numbers that
he expected and the money that he he was originally
(22:22):
estimating for, he would have done fine. Yeah, maybe he
could have ramped up slowly and grown more organically. But
the crazy success and the amazing amount of attention that
was directed towards his campaign really was an albatross around
his neck. And so the whole goal of any business
(22:43):
oriented kickstarted campaign is to have usually at least to
have a sustainable business on the other side of it, right,
So the whole goal of Coolest Cooler that campaign wasn't
just to ship out coolers to backers. It was to
create a viable business where he be selling these coolers
to other retailers and that the people who backed it
(23:06):
their reward for backing it would be getting a cooler
at a discounted price. The problem was that unless he
was selling them at this higher mark up at these retailers,
he wouldn't have the money to cover sending out those
those Backer coolers to the backers. So the backers are
(23:26):
upset because the thing that they've been waiting for is
not coming to their to their house when they expected it.
And somebody else who didn't back the campaign could, in
theory go out and order one and get one ahead
of them. Yeah, in two weeks or or a couple
of days. You have a note here, And I think
(23:46):
it's true that a big part of the issue was communication.
There are their notes and their comments about we haven't
heard anything. And so they did do a live stream
to say, look, you guys, we need fifteen million more
dollars than we expect it. We're trying to get it
through selling coolers so that we can get you your rewards.
They and they did, they send out some rewards early on,
(24:07):
and it just it got too big for them. Well,
and and that also ended up being an issue, like
there was no good way for Creeper to get out
of this because he owed something like sixty thousand people
these coolers, and he could only do them in batches,
and so what would happen is you would send out
you would have this company sending out coolers to backers
(24:29):
in these smaller batches. But the media focus was on
how many people were still waiting for a cooler. It
wasn't saying, coolest cooler has made good on you know,
ten thousand of the pledges and is working hard to
get the other fifty thousand. It was instead it was
fifty thousand people are still waiting for their coolers, which
(24:49):
wasn't doing him or his company any favors. So again, like, yes,
the mistake was his. We're not gonna lift all responsibility
off of him and say like he was a victim
in all of this. But at the same time, I
think the way it unfolded, it was pretty much a
worst case scenario for him to have to deal with
on top of all just the production headaches he had. Well,
(25:12):
he does, he does. I don't know if it's victim
blaming or a little bit of shaming, but he he
has been noted to say that he thinks part of
what has delayed him so long is that when he
put the coolers on Amazon, all of these backers went
on and made these horrible reviews because they said they
didn't have their coolers, and he's like, guys, you're shooting
yourself in the foot here. Yeah, it's it's just delaying
(25:34):
when I can get enough money to make good on
the promise I've made you. But then again, if I
were said, hey, if you pay nine dollars, will get
you your cooler quicker than you're paying the quote unquote
retail price for the cooler at which point, yeah, so
that was something else that came up with that. He said.
One solution to the problem they had was that if
you were a backer and you wanted your cooler faster,
(25:57):
you could get it by giving an extra nineties seven
dollars to the company. That would make up enough of
the difference for him to be able to put those
people on a priority list and they would get their
coolers faster. But you didn't have to do that. Again,
the way a lot of news outlets reported this, it
sounded like if you don't cough up the nineties dollars,
(26:19):
you're never going to get your cooler. That wasn't the case.
It was if you want your cooler now, you have
to pay almost an extra hundred dollars. If you are patient,
you can wait and it may take a while, but
at least in theory, you will eventually get it. I
wonder if some of those news outlets reporting it, where
the reporters maybe had backed it and we're feeling a
(26:40):
little sore, I mean, probably not. It was, it was.
It's very easy to get the the idea that the
company was bleeding backers dry. But again, the more I
look into it, the less I feel like that's the case,
and the more I feel like there was no good
pathway out of this this whole Okay, So after all this,
(27:04):
they started shipping in July of two more coolers. They
had enough money to restart shipping, and they hoped they'd
be done by October of two thousand fifteen. Uh, how
did that turn out? It didn't. Yeah, there's so, I mean,
there are still lots of people waiting for their coolers.
I'll give a kind of figure in a second. But
(27:26):
they began to sell the model of the cooler that
was covered by the kick starting campaign for four d
eight five dollars on their site, which if you look
at the if you look at the initial projected retail
price of to I'm pretty sure fo is more than that.
(27:50):
I'm an English major. But that's a lot for a cooler. Yeah,
just shy a five hundred bucks. But it also shows
that at this cooler and all the parts that were
necessary in order to put it together and to have
it do all the things that was supposed to do,
that it was way more expensive to produce than what
he had anticipated. And it's about again we'll get into
(28:14):
lessons at the end of the episode, but one thing
this immediately tells you is that whenever you are thinking
about really any business endeavor, but particularly if you're making
something physical, you should grossly overestimate how much it's going
to cost you to make it, because it will prepare
you better to when you encounter those problems to manage
(28:36):
them well. And then if you do have if you
do have a surplus at the end of it, if
everything goes as you expected and not as you planned for,
and then you can either give it back to your
supporters or you can invest it in your company to
be more successful. Um, make sure you talk to other
people who know what they're doing instead of just like
your own. Research is good, but also talk to industry experts.
(28:58):
But you know, i'd have imagine that there were there
was fallout beyond just angry consumers from all of this
failure to deliver product. Oh yeah, you had You even
had people who were ordering it and uh and you
know they're actually purchasing it online and getting it ahead
(29:18):
of time, who were reviewing it and saying the cooler
is fine, like it's there's nothing wrong with it, but
it might not be cool enough to justify the cost.
So again that ends up hurting sales, which makes it
even take even longer to to make good on these
these kickstarter backers. So it's a domino effect, right, or
(29:41):
a ripple effect if you prefer. It's a ripple effect.
If something goes wrong at ripples out and it effects
and ultimately the people that it is affecting the most,
at least in the eyes of the backers, are the backers. Yeah,
which led to some legal troubles, but we're going to
tell you about that right after this break. Okay, So
(30:04):
when we started talking about Grepper and his ideas, we
mentioned that he is from Portland, Oregon. That's where he
was operating out of, and Oregon has been the home,
not just of Grepper, but of some of Grepper's biggest woes. Yes,
he got a whole bunch of consumer complaints to the
(30:25):
Oregon Department of Justice. Three hundred fifteen incidents of complaints
were filed with that d o J in Oregon. Yeah,
because if you've got an issue with a company, you've
got to file it where that company is. Yeah, So
from people outside of Oregon complaining to Oregon. Uh, And
the complaints stated that the Coolest Cooler was being negligent
(30:46):
in delivering their product. So that was enough to to
inspire the d o J and Oregon to launch an
investigation in two So Kickstar, by the way, their policy
the states that any successful campaign is supposed to either
deliver the awards to backers that were promised or offer
(31:09):
refunds to backers. And so part of the problem here
was that Coolest Cooler, at least according to these complaints,
was refusing to refund money to backers who were discontented.
I mean they didn't have it. Yeah. But the problem
that is kickstarters own policy is that if you successfully
(31:32):
fund your project, you either have to make good on
these rewards or offer up the refund to your backers.
So it's what gave a foothold for the d o
J to really kind of look into what was going on. Yeah. Now,
in two thousand six, Um Coolest Cooler did try to
a piece people again. They added a tracking tool to
(31:54):
their website for backers to track where the progress of
their delivery was, like it hasn't even been made yet. Yeah,
you could see your place in line basically. But then
they also weren't going in chronological order of who backed
and shipping these things. They were going by address, which
makes sense from a bulk shipping standpoint. Yeah, but not
great if you happen to be like if you had
(32:15):
prided yourself on being one of the first, like let's
say that you were one of those first seventy, like
you were an early bird backer, but because of your address,
you were not at the top of that list. You
might think, what the heck, I'm the reason. I'm part
of the reason why this campaign was so successful. Yeah. Um.
They also tried to put on that tool on their
(32:36):
website where all of the money raised had gone, to
give some transparency to people. I'm guessing that didn't really
help much because they're employees of coolest cooler that we're
getting docs and Ryan's family even got some threats from
some angry consumers. Yeah. Yeah, people, man, when they don't
get what they expect, they can turn real ugly, real fast.
(32:56):
And I mean I get the frustration, trust me, I
could the frustration of backing a campaign and not getting
what you were promised when the campaign funds. I also
and at least one of those instances, did not get
a refund, nor did I get my reward. Uh. The
I cannot have any recourse for that because the company
(33:17):
that was supposed to make the thing I backed no
longer exists, so there's no one for me to get
money from at this point. It's just it's the risk
of investment. Yeah, you got to know going in that's
again you have to remember it's not a store, right.
So but there are people who they have that expectation
(33:38):
and they're like, well, I bought this product and you
won't give it to me, So therefore I it's fair game.
I'm allowed to do whatever I want to strike out
at you because you have taken my money, which you know,
so these people who filed with the organ Department of
Justice took a much Yeah, I'm more responsible and less
(34:00):
like psycho U unsympathetic approach. Yeah. Yeah, so how did
that turn out? Um, well, you know, at least turned
out well for some of the backers. The Oregon Department
of Justice did find that Coolest Cooler was or at
least was approaching the point of saying that the Coolest
(34:21):
Cooler was negligent, but Grepper was able to settle the case.
But the settlement, of course, came with some pretty strong
agreements that he had to abide by. One of those
was that, uh, he was going to have to ship
Coolest coolers to Oregonians who had backed the campaign that
included eight hundred seventy three backers in the state of Oregon.
(34:45):
He also agreed that if backers in general did not
receive their coolers by the middle of twenty so we
still have some time to go. Yeah, Like, while we're
researching this episode, there are people actively posting on the
cool Cooler Kickstarter page, I haven't gotten my cooler. Yeah,
well there's thousands of them, but that anyway, if he
(35:07):
does not get the coolers to the backers by mid
twenty for every backer who has not received his or
her cooler, they will receive twenty dollars from Grebber and
no matter if the company goes into bankruptcy or if
it's still solvent, he will owe that money. If the
company goes into bankruptcy, it will not protect him from
(35:28):
that that uh obligation. He will still have to pay
the twenty bucks per person. Well, and I know people
were not happy about this. I mean, obviously they hope
to get their cool Some of them don't even anymore,
like I don't care about this cooler anymore, and is
a small amount of their investment back, but it's something Well,
(35:48):
and you know, the idea would be that assuming the
company was still solvent, that even with the twenty dollars
being sent, it would still the cooler would still be
on its way at some point. Yeah, so it's not
like here's twenty dollars now you don't get your cooler. Yeah,
assuming that the company is still around. Of course, if
it were bankrupt, then it's just coming out of Grabber's
(36:10):
personal funds. I assume. After this settlement, Grabber actually wrote
a letter to people and he put it on the
Kickstarter as an update to all the backers, and he
explained their plan and he explained there strategies for going
forward to get this done, things like going international and
things like that, more investors and stuff, but he was
(36:30):
really salty about it. He's like, I feel vindicated that
this is how the Oregan Department of Justice ruled that
we aren't shysters. We generally want to get you your product. Yeah,
we just we can't, and you're hurting our progress, right right. Yeah,
I like like the you know, we're trying to do
good on the agreement we had, but the more you
(36:52):
guys put up a fuss, the harder it is for
us to do that. Yeah. It's kind of like, uh,
like you've promised a toddler that you're gonna go to
the water park in the afternoon, but it's still in
the morning and you need to do some errands, and
the toddler starts having a melt down. You're like, you know,
I want to go to the water parks. Says yes,
we're going to the water park, but first we have
to run errands. But I want to go to the
(37:13):
water park. I mean, mind you if I had been
promised to go to the water park in two thousand
fourteen and I hit two thousand sixteen, it's a very
long afternoon. Areal very long afternoon when you're a toddler,
time stretches before you like an infinity. Yeah, that's true. Anyhow,
in two thousand seventeen, there was actually a petition filed
on change dot org to get them to stop selling
(37:36):
their coolers until the backers got their's again, which makes
no sense. It's it's hurting the process to get you
your cooler. Yeah, that is kind of crazy, like the
idea that hey, stop stop doing this thing you're doing
that is helping fund actually getting coolers to backers and
get coolers to backers without any funds. That's not the
(37:57):
way the world works. No, no, but Grebber, you know
obvious Lee didn't listen to that. The petition didn't It
didn't change well, I mean, it's a petition. It's a petition,
doesn't doesn't have any holding value over anything other than
letting you know. There's a lot of people who are
ticked off enough to fill out a form. So, in
addition to trying to boost international sales, get more investors,
(38:17):
reduced production costs, all of which are great ideas, although
hard to get investors when you've got a bad reputation
um Greber started innovating more to try to get more money,
so he made peripherals like batteries and solar panels and
charging chords for the coolers. He made a soft sided cooler,
which is expensive for a soft stadic cooler, but apparently
is like super magnetic. It's also less expensive than the
(38:40):
full coolest coolers. Yes, and it has like a universal
attachment thing you said, you can put on your bike
or your backpacker. But the whole idea was that he
could use profits from that or revenue from the sales
of those products to help again make good on these backers.
That I have a feeling that that should the day
come when Greber is able to send off that final
(39:01):
backer cooler, it will be an enormous weight off his shoulders. So, Jonathan,
how many people would you suppose don't have their coolers yet? Well,
it's tough to say because there's not really an ongoing
tally that I could find anywhere. But in ten lateen
there was an article that stated as many as twenty
(39:23):
thousand people were still waiting for their cooler. Yeah, that's
a lot of people. So it's about a third of
the backers who who pledged at a level that was
enough to get a cooler in the first place. So
two thirds got their coolers, a third are still waiting. Um,
so that's tough. And there was an article and so
(39:45):
the Oregonian was the newspaper that published the report that
said twenty thousand people were still waiting. A few months later,
they published a second article that stated that during the
most recent quarter, according to a statement from Coolest Cooler,
the company had shipped precisely zero coolers tobackers in that
(40:06):
most recent quarter, meaning that they weren't able to do
any in that three month period. So obviously every month
that goes by is bringing them closer to that mid
twenty twenty deadline that they need to make. And um,
there have been a lot of other things that have
happened over the last couple of years that have added complications.
(40:27):
For example, you probably are familiar that there have been
some issues about tariffs and China, as as the United
States of America has enacted certain policies that have instituted
these tariffs that in turn ends up impacting the supply
chain and manufacturing plan for the Coolest Coolers, so which
(40:48):
that is not now there's nothing he can do about
it other than like he trying desperately to find a
way to still stay within budget and be able to
continue production. It's not like it halts production, but it
makes production more expensive. And since that was the problem
in the first place, in addition to the timing issues
with things like the strike, uh, that does not make
(41:09):
his life any easier. Yeah. Again, I really think the
lesson here is give yourself buffer, give yourself a leg up. Yeah, overestimate,
like you said, how much it's gonna call you talk
to people. Give yourself a longer deadline too. You know,
if backers know that going in, they might be okay
(41:30):
with that. Yeah. It's it's when you start changing things
and people had. It's when you set certain expectations and
then you have to change those expectations. That's always a problem,
and I've seen it on multiple Kickstarter campaigns, and it
almost always happens with stuff that's related to producing something physical.
And it doesn't have to be complicated either. I've backed
(41:51):
Kickstarter campaigns that were producing things like a deck of cards,
but then there are printer issues, their quality control issues,
and these things slow everything down and they increase the
costs because you have to pay for another production run
because if it's not going to meet the expectations of
your backers, then you're going to have problems that like you,
(42:12):
you either ship nothing and you tell your backers were sorry,
but the quality was not up to our standards, so
we're going to go back and try it again, or
you end up shipping something that is of substandard quality
and your backers get upset anyway because they're like, backed this,
that was a waste of money and a really long wait.
And also you know the lesson for you, uh you
(42:33):
know you've listened to this episodes so you know, but
realize that you're making an investment. It's almost like loaning
money to your family or friends where you shouldn't. You're
hoping to get something back, but you may not. Yeah,
you need to You need to ask yourself, like, can
I make this pledge if this campaign is successful? Is
it okay if this money never comes back to me? Like?
(42:54):
If I if I make this pledge, and what for
whatever reason the act will endeavor fails despite the campaign
being successful, Am I okay with taking a loss of this?
If I'm not, then maybe I should just wait until
it's for public consumers. Yeah, exactly so in this case
with coolest cooler, if you saw it and you thought, wow,
(43:17):
that sounds really awesome and I would love to have
one of these, and it would be nice to get
it for a discounted price, but I'm also aware of
the potential pitfalls that can be in the way of production.
Then you might think, well, is it is it worth
potentially saving a hundred fifteen dollars off the projected retail
(43:39):
price or is it better for me to wait, because
it could be that instead of saving a d fifteen
dollars and throwing away a Yeah, policies are great, but
the truth of the matter is, no matter how well
intentioned the inventor or the founder of the kicks starter,
if they end up going bankrupt due to misfortune, not
(44:01):
even poor planning, but just misfortune and end up living
under a bridge, you they can't refund you. It's it's
just the way it is. Um It's It's also interesting
to point out that crowdfunding has largely changed over the
last couple of years, where we're seeing more and more
established companies using crowdfunding, and they're not using it to
(44:22):
raise the money needed to make whatever the thing is.
Often the thing has already made. They're using it to
kind of judge the reception of whatever that thing is
so that they know how much of it to make
or whether or not it's going to be a successful product.
And so it's it's changing where it was kind of
(44:43):
aimed at the individual creator originally, like this was an idea,
Like you have an idea for something, you launched this
crowdfunding campaign to get the money you need to actually
bring that something into reality, and then you ship off
or you start selling or whatever. Now it's companies are
using it almost as a marketing tool, and so it's
(45:04):
it's dramatically changed how crowdfunding is working in the like
I said, in the last couple of years. But we
still have these issues and uh. And there are no
shortage of crowdfunding campaigns that do come across as kind
of scammy, so that's also good. Although to be fair,
both Kickstarter and indiego go and others have gotten a
(45:26):
lot better at weeding those out. Although indigo go you
can get your funding amount even if you don't magic Yeah,
if you don't. If you said you can, you can
choose if you set Let's say you set a ten
thousand dollar goal but you only raise five thousand dollars,
and it's on indiegog. You can choose to accept any
amount raised even if you haven't met your goal, but
(45:48):
it's with a heftier fee taken out. For indie go go,
they take a much larger percentage of the money, so
you get you get even less. So if you ask
for ten thousand dollars and you end up getting five
thousand dollars, you might only end up with four thousand dollars.
So it's it's one of those things that it's kind
of a slippery slope issue. Um, we have a couple
(46:10):
of fun facts and I just read them and now
I'm angry. I'm sorry, Jonathan. The first is Ryan Grabber
has backed his own kickstarters. Uh, he backed the potato
salad kickstarter. That's the one that gets me mad. It
is because Jonathan had a kickstarter around the same time
and his didn't get funded. But this darn potatoes salad
kickstar was a choke. The potato salad was a choke,
(46:32):
and then it got it got ridiculous. Not just backing
it was again like a crazy viral success for a
joke potato salad. I mean, the guy did take all
the funds and make a major party out of it.
All props, all props to that guy and and his
joke and the fact that it brought joy to people.
(46:55):
But I am I am unapologetically envious because I had
a project. It was near and dear to both of
our hearts. It was that I was really hoping I
could get funded, and it uh. It also managed to
buck another trend. It funded about halfway to where it
needed to be. But it was on Kickstarter. It was
(47:15):
make or break. And the reason why I say it
broke some trends is that, generally speaking, on Kickstarter, if
you reach a certain level, a certain percentage of funding,
and I want to say it's somewhere around that, of
campaigns that hit their gold during the campaign, we'll we'll
get all the way to funding by the end. Mine
(47:37):
was not one of those. I'm really sad about that too.
So we'll move on to our last fact and then
we'll wrap things up. The original version of the Coolest
Cooler had an attached to grill yeah, which turns out
probably not the best idea for a product that's mostly
made out of blast it was nixed for. Yeah, you
can't imagine a grill working too well. I mean, you
can maybe have like a stand alone little stand and
(48:02):
grill that you could put over a fire pit or something,
but even then you'd have to have it cool down
enough to be able to put it against a plastic cooler. Um.
So that wraps up our discussion about the coolest cooler.
But before we go and wrap everything up for the episode,
we also wanted to give an update about a previous
topic that we've covered. We did an episode about Toys
(48:24):
r Us and we talked about how at the end
of that episode, we talked about how UH there was
an effort to kind of bring these sort of pop
up stores to life, targets and things like that, and
the Toys r Us name might not be totally gone.
And now we've gotten word for the heads up as
of the recording of this podcast, which is on June one,
(48:44):
two thousand nineteen, that there is a a sincere effort
to bring back uh a larger version of Toys r Us,
although not at the full size of the older toy stores. Yeah,
there will be about the third of the size of
the old toy stores with more experience points, play areas
and things like that. And also they're looking at bringing
(49:04):
back their e commerce site. They're hoping to be back
by the holiday season of two thousand nineteen. So we'll
have to see if that happens. Yeah, and if it does,
we'll do another update where we'll talk about maybe we'll
have to do an episode at some point where it's
it's all follow ups on brand. I was thinking the
same thing. Clearly Canadian would be another one. Thanks for
the shout out, clearly, we greatly appreciate it. Awesome. I
(49:27):
still haven't received any crates of drinks or anything. You
don't listen to him. I totally gave him a BlackBerry,
clearly Canadian. That's not a crate. That was one drink
and it was from you, not from clearly. Not that
we do this to get stuck from companies. We're just joking.
We don't expect nor do we deserve anything from anybody.
But let's say that you wanted out there. You and
(49:49):
listener Land wanted to give us a suggestion for something
we should cover in a future episode of The Brink.
How would they reach out to us, Well, they could
email us at feedback at the Brink Podcast Dot show yep,
and you can go to our website that's the Brink
Podcast dot Show. It has an archive of all of
our previously published episodes. Got information about your beloved hosts
(50:11):
and other interesting things you can check out. And that
wraps this up until next time. I have been Jonathan
Strict and I've been aerial casting
Business on the Brink News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Ariel Kristen Kasten
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